Woman using the Xiaomi Note
Chinese smartphone maker Xiaomi has just completed its most successful flash sale ever, raking in around €310m in just 12 hours to celebrate its 5th birthday.
It also sold 39,000 Mi TVs and 720,000 smart appliances – these included 200,000 Mi Bands and almost a quarter of a million Mi Power Strips.
Dubbed its Mi Fan Festival 2015, Xiaomi’s incredible success through selling devices this way will no doubt catch the attention of other burgeoning smart-tech businesses, with the Chinese company exploding onto the scene since its creation back in 2010.
The revenue generated yesterday was a record, surpassing Xiaomi’s previous best result just six hours into the event.
Not happy with just selling the devices at a startling pace, the company was also quick on the draw to deliver the products.
Half a million orders were shipped within 12 hours, with the first delivery arriving less than 90 minutes into the sale.
Xiaomi’s emergence onto the smartphone-selling scene has seen it successfully battle for market share at the bottom end of the market.
It sold more than 61m smartphones in 2014 alone, ending the year as the leading vendor in China.
It has become so big that Microsoft eyed an opportunity to partner up, trialling Windows 10 on some of Xiaomi’s products to get a feel for the market and reach out to a monstrous audience.
Xiaomi isn’t standing still either. Last month it tweaked its smart TV offering, bringing out a lower-end 40-inch model to accommodate even more customers.
With flash sales like this, one wonders how long before it rises above the ‘best of the rest’ and chases down Samsung and Apple atop the smartphone tree.
Xiaomi Note image, via Shutterstock
